`Mommy Deer'

And Other Reflections On Women Of The '50s

November 21, 1993|By Text by Jeff Lyon, a Magazine staff writer.

In the idealized, white-fenced world of June Cleaver, Harriet Nelson and Donna Reed, there was nothing to suggest that being the perfect 1950s-style Mom might lead to anything other than blissful fulfillment. Anxiety or depression? Absurd. Boredom? Remorse? Bosh.

But real-life women were finding cracks in the mirror. It is no accident that Miltown, Valium and the other tranquilizers that became available in the 1950s quickly earned the nickname "Mother's little helpers."

FOR THE RECORD - Additional material published Nov. 28, 1993:Corrections and clarifications.A quote in a story about free-lance photographer Judy Olausen in the Nov. 21 issue of the Tribune Magazine gives the mistaken impression that Gloria Steinem once was a Playboy Bunny. Steinem did, indeed, work as a Playboy Bunny, but on assignment as an undercover reporter for Show magazine. The Tribune regrets the error.

Judy Olausen grew up in a typical 1950s home. Her mother, Vivian, then in her 30s, was a traditional housewife who raised three children, kept a husband going and provided her four clients with 24-hours worth of personal services, medical care and homely wisdom, all while unable to get so much as a credit card in her own name.

Young Olausen eventually grew up and, like most of the women of her generation, moved with comparative ease into the career world, joining the Minneapolis Star Tribune as a photographer. Her mother, meanwhile, never left her little slice of domesticity.

One day it hit Olausen that her mother's way of life was vanishing as surely as that of the Plains Indians. "The world has changed so much for women and gotten so much better," she says, "that younger women don't know what it was like for my mother's generation. They don't know that the freedoms they take for granted weren't available to them not so very long ago. So I decided to tell the story of the 1950s woman in pictures.

"It was a dramatic and pivotal era for women, the last days without reproductive freedom."

Thus was born Judy Olausen's whimsical collection of mom-entos, quasi-Dada-esque portraits of women from this antebellum time. They are funny, outrageous and oddly disturbing photographs.

For a model, Olausen stayed close to home.

She chose her own mother.

Amazingly, Vivian Olausen said yes.

Soon, the younger Olausen was posing her mother trudging laboriously through a supermarket with a heavy cross on her back, and lying on top of an old sedan wearing antlers and tied down like a hunter's trophy. In others, Vivian Olausen was depicted stretched out dead along a highway ("Mother as Road Kill"), prone along a beach ("Mother Washed Ashore"), bearing a holiday turkey while wearing a crown of thorns, and dressed in robes while posed as the Virgin Mary.

"These shots are from the heart," Judy says. "I didn't want to wave a finger in people's faces. I wanted to tell the story in more of a fun way, to show that my mother didn't have it so easy. Men seem to enjoy the pictures. And, of course, women love them."

Judy treats each photograph as a painstaking challenge, sparing no expense in digging up props. For the "Mommie Deer" shot, she and her mother traveled to Grand Rapids to find just the right kind of wooded background, even though their hometown, Minneapolis, is not exactly devoid of timber. "The woods near Grand Rapids are so incredible," Judy says. "There isn't a forest like that around Minneapolis, where it's dark and the trees have grown up so high. The site also had an old junkyard nearby where I was able to buy a crummy car, an old Plymouth Volare."

Another time, Judy popped for $1,500 in air tickets to fly her mother to Phoenix. The idea was to pose Vivian as the Virgin Mary riding a donkey. "The trouble was, we got to the dude ranch where we had reserved a donkey for the day, and a trainer, and it turned out it wasn't a donkey but a mule," Judy says. "There's a big difference. It made my mother look like she was on a horse. So we scrapped that shot."

Does her mother mind posing for such off-the-wall pictures? Not at all. "My mother is a lovely, kind woman," Judy says. "I'm blessed with this wonderful, happy, laughing mother who likes to have fun. I don't think she sees these things as degrading her. She sees it as a modeling job. I'm trying to tell a story, and she wants to help me."

The photos have become an excuse for mother and daughter to get together. "But even though we are having fun, these pictures are very serious for me," says Judy, who has left the Star Tribune for commercial photography and finances the "Mother" project out of her own pocket.

To date, Olausen has completed 15 photographs of a planned 25. She hopes to publish them as a book. Meanwhile, she has attracted some media attention as a result of a mistake. She was sending a portfolio of her commercial work to Advertising Age when one of the "Mom" shots accidentally got into the batch. Ad Age asked to see more and eventually ran a story about the pictures.

Not long after, Olausen's work was featured in Harper's magazine. It was also on Connie Chung's nationally televised program, "Eye to Eye."

When CBS called to book her for the show, Olausen thought it was her brothers pulling a prank on her. She was rude on the phone, which she thinks added to her cachet. "It probably made me seem like one of those inflated-ego superstar photographers."

Among upcoming shots planned by Olausen is a portrait of her mother as a Playboy Bunny. "I'm going to dedicate it to Gloria Steinem, who once was a Bunny," she says. "It's not going to be easy. My mother's a size 20." In another shot, her mother will be posed against a hill with a giant tarantula coming down to devour her."

What will that one demonstrate? Says Olausen: "That if her husband had left her, she would have been eaten alive. She was without her own life, without a career; she couldn't even buy a car or get a credit card without her husband's signature. It was just all these awful little things that added up to a lot."